All right you guys have a good week end, I'm headed home to put a new exhaust system on my 350 powered S-15.

I'm taking the 3 inch single system off and putting 2-1/2 duals on. The only problem seems to be how to fit a Basket of Snakes in the space for a Can of Worms.

Bogie  

I’m responding to myself just to document a method of putting duals on V6 or V8 conversions to the S-10 or, the real truck, S-15. I’ve played with several configurations over the years, none of which make me entirely happy as this project leads to all kinds of compromises and complexities that range from expensive to inefficient or both. I’ve been looking for something that’s fairly simple and yet effective. Once again I discovered neither, but here goes in-case you’re also looking for a solution this dilemma.

As I said before, I was going to spend the week end trying to stuff a “Basket of Snakes” into the space of a “Can of Worms” by removing the single exhaust from my 89 S-15 with 95 Camaro 350 and putting duals on it, all without relocating the fuel tank. The chassis is an 89 standard cab, short bed, with 2 wheel drive, slammed a couple inches. Now if you live in California or a state that inspects to Cal standards, this isn’t legal, it also just isn’t legal anywhere but if they don’t look!?

I wanted to play with some new ideas so I started by making a double hump transmission cross member by buying another from a wreck and then with some cutting, hammering, cussing and finally welding made a double hump cross member. All this so I could run a collector and catalytic converter on each side. The truck is lowered a couple inches so all the space I can get to stuff pipes and parts up is useful and necessary to avoid drainage dips, holes in the pavement and stuff dumped on the roadway.

The Sanderson Shorty's don't exit in the same place making the collectors offset with the shorter on the left side. Plus, you’ll need a 60 degree bend on the left side and 45 on the right with more hammer work on the floor boards. I added some length to the left side collector to even it up to the right side just for mounting the rest of the system’s components.  To trip the tuning waves it needed the same length on each side so I fab’ed up a balance pipe that snakes around to intercept the collectors at the same distance from each header/collector joint. The O2 sensor gets plugged into the balance pipe. I put a short length of flex pipe into the collector between the balance pipe and the cats to provide the engine mounted header/collector/balance pipe some free movement from the body mounted cats, mufflers, and tailpipes. I put a pair of 27 inch Thrushes under the right side of the bed opposite the fuel tank. The left side coming off the converter makes a three dimensional "S" bend up before the fuel tank under the package tray step of the floor with another 90 that goes over the driveshaft and another 90 faces to the rear to connect to its muffler. The right side makes a simple “S” of two 90’s to get from under the cab up to its muffler.  I made a “T” shaped bracket and welded it to the Thrushes, pairing them, that engages the original 4 bangers exhaust pipe mount to hang them. The left side tail pipe makes a 45 down with another 45 back to wrap around the rear axle housing and exits under the valance panel to the right of the dip it takes for the license plate. For the left side, a 45 jogs from the muffler to the left side of the vehicle, another 45 drops behind the rear axle, while the last 45 aims the final piece of pipe to exit under the valance panel to the left of the license plate mount. A pair of 2-1/4 to 3 inch chrome tips finishes things off.

While welding up the balance pipe and collector assembly on the bench, I leaned my left forearm on a side I had just welded, so I'm running this bead and I'm smelling something burning, it took a few moments before realizing it's me. So I jerk the torch off the tubes leaving the rod to cool in its puddle, shut off the gases and flip up my visor all the while my arm's frying. Drop the torch, take my free hand and beat the flames on my coveralls and shirt out. Cuss about the interruption, figure what damage has been done to my arm is done, so relight the torch, flip the visor down and go back to melting my rod out of it's pool of iced over metal. "Stupid is as stupid does" I think is how the line from Forrest Gump goes. Need a new pair of coveralls and a denim shirt, arm will heal probably whitout hair.

You will find that if you build a double hump crossmember, making a jig from some scrap lumber to align everything is a lot more accurate than trying to fab it in pieces to weld up under the truck.

Now I’m in the test phase for leaks and mounting problems. This set up proved to be more complex and expensive than I thought it would. However, it works pretty well so far. For you guys who are rolling your own, I hope this is useful information.

Details available if you need them.

BOL
Bogie